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From Humor to Horror in Turkey: How Could They Beat Their Own People? (…)

This morning, as I looked to the popular headline service Twitter for accounts of secular protest across Turkey, what struck me first was the humor in a pair of photographs from Ankara and Adana:

What whimsy, I thought. What fun. But then I thought about why some of these largely peaceful protesters are wearing masks — it’s to be protected from retaliation by religious authoritarians. The Islamist government in Turkey is deploying police to stop the current wave of dissent, repeatedly beating protesters:

For a well-composed summary of recent event in Turkey, I recommend this article by Sumandef Hakk?nda. For the most current information, scan through posts on the #OccupyGezi hashtag. While you do, reflect on just how lucky we Americans are to live in a land where an incipient grassroots social movement cannot be quelled by police brutality.

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About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

3 thoughts on“From Humor to Horror in Turkey: How Could They Beat Their Own People? (…)”

Hey Jim – great juxtaposition of the whimsy with the violence. A ways back we were discussing chemtrails. I found a guy who spent a few years researching it and wanted to pass along the site for your consideration.

I actually stayed far out of the “chemtrail” discussion on purpose, because I have not encountered a simple falsifiable (that is, testable) hypothesis from the “chemtrail” community. Instead, there seems to be a lot of suggestion without verification of specific claims. That terraforminginc.com is stylistically flashy, but I have no idea what it shows. I therefore find discussions of ideas like “chemtrails” (or similar claims like Morgellons) to be like punching fog.

Yeah, there’s enough going wrong already with Monsanto’s death seeds and GMO gene experiments on us all (with out our consent through many unlabeled products we already consume and feed our families); fracking and the destruction of fresh water by the millions of gallons, earthquake potential and occurance, air pollution and now radioactive waste water too; and speaking of that, Fukushima just gets worse by the week and they have no idea how to “fix” it or how long it will take and meanwhile they’re polluting the crap out of the Pacific Ocean, the US and everywhere else the jet stream and ocean currents carry their toxic byproduct with a half life measured in tens of thousands of years. This is all just added on to all the other messes our industrial civilization has caused and still hasn’t cleaned up from the Exxon spill to the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

Hey – thanks for caring about what you DO care about! Most people couldn’t give a care.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.